Q. How do you get to be a slayer?
A. "In every generation, a slayer is called..." Slayers
are usually located as young girls and trained by the Council of Watchers.
However, it seems that how early a slayer is identified can vary from
situation to situation  while Kendra was taken as a child, Buffy did not
find out until she was called ("Becoming I," S2).

Q. Why are there two slayers right now?
A. Buffy died (stopped breathing) and was resuscitated by Xander
in S1 finale "Prophecy Girl." Kendra, who died in
"Becoming I" (S2) was called as a result of that death, and
Faith was called when Kendra died.

Q. Why wasn't another slayer called after Buffy died in "The Gift"?
A. The line of succession is now understood to run through Faith.
No new slayer will be called until she dies. However, this has only
been stated in interviews  never onscreen  so Joss could
change His mind at any time.

Q.
How come Buffy could close the portal at the end of S5?
A. Because Dawn was made from Buffy's blood. No, really, the script
says so.

Q.
How does someone become a vampire?
A. It's a whole big sucking thing. A vampire drinks the victim's
blood until his or her heart slows down and he or she is near death,
and then the victim drinks the vampire's. The victim dies and is
reborn as a vampire.

Q.
If a vampire doesn't need to eat or drink for sustenance, why do they?
If a vampire doesn't need to breathe, why can they smoke?
A. They don't need to, but they can.

Q. If
vampires don't have a heartbeat or blood pressure, how do they achieve
an erection?
A. Willpower. And a little touch of Jossy Dust.

Q: Why
can I see Angel/Spike/Drusilla/Darla breathing?
A. Because they're played by human actors, the undead, as Mr. Minear
once told us, being notoriously difficult to recruit. It's the damned
unions.

Q. How old is Angel?
A. Darla sired Angel in 1753 ("Becoming I," S2). That
means he'll celebrate his 250th unbirthday in 2003.

Q.
How did Angel return from the Hell dimension after S2?
A. There's no explanation given onscreen, but the understanding
is it's the work of the Powers that Be.

Q.
Who is Spike's sire  Drusilla or Angel?
A. Drusilla, as shown in the S5 episode "Fool for Love."
Yes, he called Angel his sire in "School Hard" (S2). It
was probably just a mistake, but official canon is that sire can
also mean grandsire.

Q.
How old is Spike?
A. This keeps changing. In "School Hard" (S2), Giles says
Spike is "barely 200," which would mean he was vamped
around 1798. But he says he's "only 126" in "The
Initiative (S4), which would put his vamping around 1873. But the
date of his onscreen vamping in "Fool for Love" (S5) was
1880, and that's generally considered canon. This makes him 123
as of 2003.

Q.
Why did Spike get his soul at the end of S6? Didn't he want
his chip out?
A. It certainly looked that way, didn't it? But the official line,
as propagated in interviews with Joss Whedon, is that he always
wanted his soul back so he could deserve Buffy. No, it doesn't matter
that he said "make me what I was" and he was never a chipped,
souled vampire before.

Q.
When is Buffy's birthday? Wasn't it different in S1?
A. The Buffy's birthday episodes have traditionally aired in late
January, and many fans use Jan. 19, 1981 as the date, based on the
original airdate of "Surprise" and "Innocence"
(Jan. 19 and 20, 1998). However, Buffy's student records were shown
onscreen briefly in "I Robot, You Jane" (S1), and they
had two alternate dates - Oct. 24, 1980 and May 6, 1979. These are
probably errors.

Q.
Who is Dawn?
A. Dawn is Buffy's little sister, except she's not.

Dawn is The Key to breaking down dimensional walls. Glory and
a group of mystical warriors, the Knights of Byzantium, both wanted
The Key. Glory wanted to go home; the KoB wanted to stop her.
Glory's encroachment led the monks of the Order of Dagon, who
had care of The Key, to send it to The Slayer for safe-keeping.
They sent it in the form of a young girl, providing her with a
lifetime of memories, and altering the memories of everyone connected
with the Summers in such a way that it would seem that Dawn had
always been there. Before S5 Buffy was an only child and Dawn
did not exist.

Dawn appears to be what Faith referred to in her prophecy dream
non sequitur, "Little Miss Muffett, counting down from 7-3-0,"
(from "Graduation Day Part 2," S3) and "Little
sis coming...So much to do before she gets here," (from "This
Year's Girl," S4) "7-3-0" may be a measure of time,
as in days (365 x 2), indicating the breakdown of dimensions that
occurred at the end of Season Five which was initiated by The
Key. (This timeline is based on the fact that Faith made this
comment at the end of Season Three.)

The Key's usefulness for hellgods expired at the "appointed
time" but it remains to be seen if Dawn retains a supernatural
aspect.

Q.
How old is Dawn? How come she's just starting high school in S7
when she was 14 in S5?
A. Dawn was said to be 14 in S5 and in 9th grade in S6. This should
make her 16 and a sophomore in S7, but "Lessons" referred
to this as her first year of high school. However, the script also
has Buffy say that her sister will be at the school for three years,
indicating that the new Sunnydale High School is 10th-12th grades
only.

Q.
What's up with the complexity of Faith?
A. You may want to take up that question with your nearest religious
leader, but if you're asking about the Dark Slayer, well, she was
good. Then she was bad. Then she was in a coma. Then she was bad
again, but on Angel. Now she's in jail, heading back to good.

Q.
Who are the Scoobies? What about the Slayerettes?
A. Those are both nicknames for the gang of people who assist Buffy
in her fight against the Forces of Darkness. Buffy, Willow, Xander
and Giles are the original Scooby Gang, and since then Cordelia,
Oz, Riley, Tara and Anya have joined and/or departed. Angel and
Spike were/are regulars, but not proper gang members. The names
Scooby Gang and Slayerettes are rooted in canon. Willow first used
"Slayerettes" in "The Witch" (S1), and Xander
coined "Scooby Gang" in the S2 episode "What's My
Line? Part I."

Q.
Whatever happened to Oz? Drusilla? Riley? Harmony? Joyce? Hank Summers?
Miss Kitty Fantastico?
A. OZ fell in lust with a female werewolf (Veruca) and left to find
a way to tame the beast within ("Wild at Heart," S4).
He came back a few months later, but left again when Willow told
him she loved Tara ("New Moon Rising").

DRUSILLA dumped Spike for a chaos demon sometime after "Becoming
II" (S2). Spike tries to have a love spell cast on her in
"Lover's Walk" (S3), but ultimately decides to just
find her, "tie her up, and torture her until she likes me
again." By the time Spike is back on the show in S4, their
breakup is permanent. Wolfram & Hart brought Drusilla to L.A.
to re-sire Darla in Angel's second season; once she was done there,
she returned to Sunnydale in "Crush" (S5), but decided
after some bondage fun that she couldn't be with the new, chipped,
slayer-obsessed Spike. Her current whereabouts are unknown.

RILEY ran off to south America with his military unit in "Into
The Woods" (S5). He turned up again, married to a fellow
soldier, in "As You Were" (S6). Many Buffistas sincerely
hope we've seen the last of him.

HARMONY also dumped Spike, in "Crush." She went to
L.A. to visit Cordelia ("Disharmony," Angel S2), joined
a vampire cult, almost got everyone killed, and was let go after
a stern lecture.

JOYCE died of natural causes in "The Body" (S5).

HANK SUMMERS was still in Spain with his secretary the last we
heard ("Life Serial," S6).

MISS KITTY FANTASTICO's fate is unknown. She was last seen onscreen
in "Family," S5.

Q.
What happened to Whistler?
A. In-show, we have no idea. Out-of-show, the actor wasn't available.
Originally Doyle was written to be Whistler.

Q.
Who is Dead Gay Larry?
A. He was a high school bully, who came out of the closet in "Phases"
(S2). He was killed during the battle against the mayor in "Graduation
Day, Part II."

Q.
Who is Ripper?
A. Giles, when he was young and wild and into some serious black
magic. The nickname (probably a variation of "Rupert")
was revealed by Ethan Rayne in "Halloween." (S2).

Q.
Didn't the same actress play Halfrek and Cecily? What's the
connection between them?
A. Both characters were played by the actress Kali Rocha. When Halfrek
first saw Spike (In "Older and Far Away," S6), she gasped
"William!", which could imply that Halfrek used to be
Cecily. But it's never been explicitly stated on the show either
way.

Q.
What the hell was the deal with that episode where Buffy
was in the asylum?
A. That's "Normal Again" (S6). Buffy was a little touched
in the head for the episode, suffering under the effects of a demon
serum that sent her back and forth between a world whereshe was
the Slayer (the world we know) and one where she was locked up in
an insane asylum for having delusions of being a Slayer. She had
to make the choice of Slayer or non-Slayer reality--guess which
one she chose? But many fans believe the episode left some room
to wiggle, in terms of reality. Consider it basically the same as
the Wishverse, or the Birthdayverse on Angel.

Q.
The Wishverse?
A. Ah, the Wishverse. Where puppies play and people sing and--oops,
wrong alternate universe. The Wishverse first appeared in the S3episode
"The Wish" when Anya (AKA Anyanka) first appeared to grant
Cordelia a vengeful wish on Xander Harris. Cordy wished that "Buffy
Summers had never come to Sunnydale." Poof, we're in an alternate
reality. The Master was unalive and kicking, Willow and Xander were
his uber-sexy vampire minions, and Angel was shirtless and in chains.
(Wait. That was different than normal?) Cordy was killed about twenty
minutes in, but Giles figured the whole thing out and got the universe
back to its relative normalcy by taking Anya's powers. The Wishverse
storyline was addressed again in "Doppelgangland" (S3)
when Anya tried to become a demon again and succeeded in bringing
Vamp!Willow over from the alternate universe. Wackiness ensued.
Regular Willow wore tight-fitting leather. It was of the good. But
stuff happened, and now the Wishverse only appears in fiction and
our active imaginations.

Q.
The Birthdayverse?
A. And now we move into Angel. This was from S3's episode "Birthday"
where Cordelia went into a coma after a particularly ouchy vision.
She was given the chance to see what her life would have been like
had she never met Angel in LA. She was famous, an actress, everything
she'd dreamed of in Season One. She even got a theme song! But then
she managed to run into Gunn and Armless!Wes, who took her to see
Angel. See, if Doyle didn't give the visions to her, then who? Angel.
He's even crazier than normal, shirtless (do we see a recurring
theme here?), and huddled in a corner. In the end, she chooses the
visions regardless, much to the annoyance of the Powers That Be
and their friend Skip. She demanded tobe returned back to the normal
universe, and ended up demonized. The Birthdayverse is another fanfiction
favorite, and is sometimes called the Gayest Alternate Universe
Ever.

Q.
Any other 'verses I should know about?
A. Well, now that you've asked... There's the universe of perpetual
Wednesdays. And the world without shrimp. And technically, there's
the universe pre-Dawn, and the universe post-Dawn. But other than
that, there's just happy little Sunnydale and its resident Slayer.

Q.
What's with demons and kittens?
A. Well, kittens are cute and, if you're a demon, yummy. The idea
of kittens as demon currency/snack foods was initiated in the poker
game Spike takes Buffy to in the S6 episode "Life Serial."

Q.
What's 5x5 mean?
A. The phrase five by five comes from radiotelephony and radiotelegraphy,
indicating readability and signal strength, rated on a scale of
one to five, five being best, and if you're five by five you're
coming through loud and clear. Faith introduced it into the Buffyverse
in "Faith, Hope and Trick" (S3), and the phrase is closely
identified with her. It was the title of her first Angel episode
during Angel's first season.